Energy Workforce: Technical Roles — Engineers, Technicians & Operators
Most energy hiring is technical: the engineers who design and connect plants and grids, the technicians and lineworkers who build and maintain them, and the operators who run them. Many of these roles need a certificate or a licence before the first day on site, so the pool of people who can start is smaller than the pool who could learn the job.
These pages follow those roles one by one, from open postings at energy employers: how many there are, where they are, what employers ask for and, where postings state it, the pay. AI, data, digital and trading roles have their own pages under AI, digital & trading talent in energy; a posting is counted on one of the two, never both.
One caveat on coverage: these counts come from the careers sites of the energy employers we track — utilities and grid operators, oil and gas companies, turbine and equipment makers, renewables developers and miners — and from energy job boards. That is a broad sample, not a census: employers we do not track are missing, so read the figures as a view of the market rather than its full size.
4,445 open technical postings across 19 roles, from 22,813 open postings at 702 employers in 138 countries — last updated 5 October 2026.
Engineering roles
- Project Engineer & Manager649 open postings543 senior or above · United States median USD 140,000
- Mechanical Engineer396 open postings188 senior or above · United States median USD 159,000
- Electrical Engineer361 open postings166 senior or above · United States median USD 156,000
- Civil & Structural Engineer176 open postings77 senior or above · Canada median CAD 119,000
- Process & Chemical Engineer147 open postings55 senior or above · United States median USD 148,000
- Geoscientist & Subsurface Engineer139 open postings53 senior or above · Canada median CAD 115,000
- Commissioning Engineer133 open postings66 senior or above · United States median USD 136,000
- Nuclear Engineer110 open postings46 senior or above · United States median USD 163,000
- Reliability & Integrity Engineer90 open postings24 senior or above · United States median USD 144,000
- Renewables & Storage Engineer71 open postings36 senior or above · United States median USD 160,000
- Grid & Transmission Planning Engineer59 open postings28 senior or above · United States median USD 135,000
Technician and trade roles
- Field Service Technician & Engineer341 open postings47 senior or above · United States median USD 81,000
- Maintenance Technician & Mechanic279 open postings23 senior or above · United States median USD 115,000
- Lineworker & Electrician275 open postings5 senior or above · Canada median CAD 129,000
- Wind Turbine Technician236 open postings9 senior or above · United States median USD 65,000
- Instrumentation & Controls Technician30 open postings1 senior or above · no country yet meets the pay-disclosure floor
Operations and safety roles
How these pages are counted
A posting counts as open if it was seen on an employer's careers site or an energy job board in the last 21 days, and each is counted once. A role gets its own page once at least 10 open postings are tracked, and every page refreshes each Monday.
Pay is shown only where postings disclose it, as a median per country with the number of postings behind it. The skills and certificates table is counted by code from the posting text, not written by a model; the short summary at the top of each page is written by a model from those same counts.
Hiring for one of these roles? Paste its job description for a hiring-feasibility brief: whether it can be filled, at what price, and who else could do it.
Planning further ahead? See where the energy training pipeline stands, region by region, in the words of each region's own training bodies.